You could say that loving science was a dominant gene for Caron Trumbo. She did her first Punnett square — a diagram that shows genetic combinations’ possibilities — as a ninth grader at Lord Botetourt High School.
“I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do,” said Trumbo, whose last name was Leonard in those days and whose first name is pronounced kuh-RON.
After graduating high school in 2003, she headed for Texas A&M, where in 2008 she received degrees in bioenvironmental science and genetics. She wanted to move back to the Roanoke Valley, she told a group of life sciences experts and entrepreneurs during a September gathering at Twisted Track Brewpub, but the professional landscape didn’t look inviting.
A lot has changed since then, she said. After a circuitous route that included research at Randolph-Macon College and science-related sales and marketing gigs on the West Coast, Trumbo in 2016 wound up in Richmond, where she is vice president for operations at Virginia Biotechnology Association. Virginia Bio is a nonprofit trade association that fosters biosciences in the commonwealth.
Nowadays in Southwest Virginia, the Verge alliance, which includes the Roanoke Blacksburg Technology Council and the Regional Accelerator and Mentoring Program, or RAMP, is working to build the region’s tech and life sciences sectors. The Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC uses the combined powers of Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic to amp up innovations. Roanoke is contributing municipal resources, including cash and real estate, to the efforts. That combination has opened the field for multiple science jobs in the valleys.
Virginia Bio has been a part of it, with its president, John Newby, a member of the Verge board. Trumbo, in her eight years with Virginia Bio, has been a spark, said Erin Burcham, the Verge president and RBTC director.
[Disclosure: Verge, RBTC and Carilion Clinic are among our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
“Between John and Caron, they both have been great supporters of the Roanoke-Blacksburg region,” Burcham said. “Both are really motivated to help us grow our biotech/life science ecosystem and over the last couple of years have just been great partners.”
They brought their largest annual conference, THRiVE, to the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center in spring 2022, where they highlighted many of the region’s entrepreneurs and assets to Virginia Bio members statewide, Burcham said. After the Richmond organization received a GO Virginia grant called Bio Connect, they used it to connect all regions in the state that were focusing on biotech and provided mentorship and technical support all around, she said. They’ve mixed serious business with fun, as well, helping RBTC launch its Beer & Biotech series.
“As far as Caron personally, she is definitely an example of a scientist who grew up in Botetourt County, who has through her role at a statewide organization helped to bring light to this side of the state and to highlight on a statewide level what’s going on in this region,” Burcham said. “And she has a big affinity for Roanoke, Blacksburg and has helped us to share the economic development story around biotech in this region and help to advocate for more resources and focus on this region.”
Cardinal News sat down recently with Trumbo to talk about how the Roanoke-Blacksburg landscape has changed since her days as a young college graduate looking for a job. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Q: You were saying at the Twisted Track event [part of RBTC’s annual Game Changer Week activities in September], that when you left here, there wasn’t really the kind of atmosphere where you felt like you could find a job.
A: When I graduated, I came back to the Roanoke area and looked for a job. Novozymes was the main research facility here that I knew about. It was hard to get in there, like straight out of school at that time. And I didn’t have any connections; all my connections were in Texas. So I started looking elsewhere and ended up finding a job at Randolph-Macon College as lab manager in the genetics lab.
But there was not very much here. … Fralin Biomedical Research Institute hadn’t even started yet. [The institute’s founding director] Dr. [Michael] Friedlander was a year or two in when I started working at Virginia Bio. And so there were just very few options. Even now, as an adult, I’ve learned that there were options I didn’t know existed then. They just weren’t being marketed really well. Salem VA Medical Center, they have an R&D area. My mom worked there as a nurse for 30-plus years, and I had no clue they had research until I started working with Virginia Bio and we started working with them there. And then, you know, Virginia Western [Community College], at the time, I didn’t know they had lab technicians, anything like that.
So I’ve been with Virginia Bio, it’ll be eight years in January. And I started out as their communication life science specialist, which was very funny because I have no communication degree whatsoever. But I knew how to talk science to non-scientists. … I wanted to do something that kind of combined my love of research, my love of people and the newfound bug of the startup space. And Virginia Bio was the perfect fit.
Q: Explaining science to non-science people. Tell me a little bit about that.
A: I’ve learned we have to start with government and legislators. We need to tell them what’s happening in the state. Because without Virginia Bio advocating for the industry, it’s hard to get that voice out there sometimes. So we do it on a state level as well as regional areas. And then we also have to talk to our economic developers. They need to know this industry is growing. And we need to bring in more companies that can support this industry, whatever that looks like for your area, as well as your career centers, your HR people for different companies where they might not always know what we mean when we say advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing. So we need to explain what that looks like. So we do a lot of that.
[Trumbo’s father-in-law is retired 25th Circuit Judge Malfourd “Bo” Trumbo, who served terms in the Virginia General Assembly as both a delegate and a senator.]
Q: So early on in your time there, was your father-in-law helpful to your understanding of how the state legislature works?
A: In some ways, yeah. So he was no longer in the legislature by any means. And I started in January of 2016, which was also like two days before that General Assembly session started. Our CEO at the time, Jeff Gallagher, was leading the charge for advocacy for our industry. And he handed me a stack of invitations and said, “Go deliver these invitations to legislators for the bioscience caucus. You need to go to the G.A.B.”
And I just sat there for a minute being like, I don’t understand anything he just told me. I don’t know what any of that means. [The G.A.B. is an acronym for the General Assembly Building.] So once he gave me enough to know where to go, I called my father-in-law and was like, “So, who do I give these to?”
[He said], “You’re looking for their legislative aides. They will give them to the legislators. But you’re really going to want to talk to the secretaries, because they’re going to be the ones that are going to tell you where everybody is, and who’s the right person.”
And then often I would call him with questions about just what was happening, because I truly knew nothing legislatively when I started this position. And we are an advocacy organization at the end of the day. So he really helped in my crash course for that.
Q: Now you’re collaborating with people who are developing things down here, you see things in Southwest Virginia start to change a little more and more opportunities are available. Talk a little bit about that.
A: So when I first started, we mainly came to Roanoke as an organization to work with RBTC, to do a joint event called the Southwest Virginia Life Science Forum. And this was something that we cohosted and rotated between Blacksburg and Roanoke every other year. And we’d allow students to present their research poster-style, and have a networking event. … And everyone just loved to come and see what the students were working on. This event always did really well — we had about 100 people, minimum. And that was the only thing we came for. That was it. … There wasn’t a lot else going on.
We knew everything that Dr. Friedlander was working on. He’s on our board. We were keeping up with that. And watching that grow has been amazing. I mean, right before COVID, we had one of these life science forums. And I remember Dr. Friedlander commenting about the big hole in the ground … [where] they were building. And now there are so many more buildings than there were when he first made that comment, because just so much growth has happened. And now there’s more of a need to do things around the biotech space than just one science forum a year. So we hope to bring that back in the spring. …
Erin Burcham has done amazing things to help build up the area. We needed somebody that could connect it. We had the players here, you know. You had Dr. Friedlander, doing such phenomenal work at Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. You had Carilion always involved; now they have Carilion Innovation, which is just really helping those smaller companies. You have RBTC, RAMP — still new, comparatively. And then you have the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, in Blacksburg, and Brett [Malone, its CEO] has really helped guide that.
Now this is a place that you want to come to do science. I mean, they have partnerships with Johnson & Johnson JLABS, which I want everyone to understand what a big deal that is, because it is huge for this area to have Johnson & Johnson recognizing this area has stuff going on. We need to partner with them. There’s partnerships with Children’s National Hospital up in D.C. happening through Fralin Biomedical Research. There are so many great partnerships happening.
And right now we just need to keep up the lab space. [Carilion has partnered with Roanoke, the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, Verge and Virginia Western Community College to develop biotechnology incubator labs in a Carilion building on South Jefferson Street.] But that couldn’t have happened without your economic developer; city of Roanoke really put their money where their mouth was on making this happen. And then the state has come in and really added funds for this area to show yes, we’re behind this. It’s important we see it. Because otherwise I’m not sure what would have happened to this region if you hadn’t changed the trajectory. When I was little, it was trains. The “trains to brains” is what I’ve been hearing since I came back. And that’s definitely become the case. …
It’s been a statewide change, you know. Every area is growing in biotech. The state, the full state is putting money behind it; they see it happening. But Roanoke has the longest trajectory to get. They started out lower, and they are just skyrocketing up now. I mean, no one can keep up with the pace to which they’re changing here. So I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like in 10 more years. What is this going to look like? The small companies that can now start out of Fralin or out of Carilion or out of the Corporate Research Center and then get bigger.
And that brings in a whole new trained workforce that Amy White [dean of Virginia Western’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics school] is helping with … and Virginia Tech is doing it, and Radford University, and they’re all trying to get those students to fill these jobs that we all see coming. It’s amazing.
[Agriculture] is also a big part of it here. It’s not just your traditional biotech. It’s the ag-bio side, things to which controlled environmental ag [including greenhouses and vertical farms] is a huge thing. It’s really on the rise, I think pretty much everywhere. Richmond has a large area that’s coming. But Roanoke is primed to set that up. … I think the Roanoke area, Roanoke-Botetourt, [has] the space. So why not make use of that space and these buildings that aren’t otherwise being used? In the post-COVID [world] we have a ton of buildings not being used, it doesn’t matter where you are. So why not use it for things like that? And I just love to see the innovation of doing that here. Because I, you know, 15 years ago wouldn’t have dreamed it.
Q: Elaborate a little bit more on what Roanoke specifically is bringing to the table and in this era.
A: Virginia has what we call five major hubs of research. Virginia Bio [has] a GO Virginia grant that we called Virginia Bio Connect. Because all of these regions were growing so much, we needed some way to connect them all. Because on their own, they can do some great things. But together we can truly put Virginia on the map, which is kind of the goal.
And under Virginia Bio Connect, we kind of picked these hubs based on their GO Virginia regions. … Every area kind of has their specialty that’s a great way to market to outsiders. You know, if you’re going to come to Richmond, you’re going to have the advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing cluster that’s happening there. If you’re going to go to Northern Virginia, we’re going to have all of your [Department of Defense] and, you know, contract resource research organizations out there.
I really look at Roanoke as an area you go to for oncology, anything neuro. The neuro research happening here is incredible. And then opioid research, stuff that’s coming out of Fralin around that is just incredible. And then of course, you have all that stuff that no one else in the state, in my mind, can compete with — Virginia Tech and the companies that come out of that. … So I look at this area as like, if you really want to do any of those opioid, neuro or oncology [projects], this is a great area to come to and do that research, because you’re going to have phenomenal collaborators. And putting everybody together really helps come up with these ideas.
